Linux Gram articles from March 2009

Linux Gram archives from March 2009

Microsoft Sues TomTom's Embedded Linux for Patent Infringement.
March 2, 2009... Well, it's finally happened. Microsoft, which has only sued two other companies for patent infringement in its whole life, is exercising its patent rights over Linux and suing TomTom, the Dutch-based portable GPS device house, for ignoring its...

Intel & Dell Move To Protect the Word 'Netbook'.
March 2, 2009... Intel and Dell have moved to snuff out the trademark claims of Psion Teklogix, the Ontario-based Anglo-Canadian concern that has been sending cease-and-desist letters to PC manufacturers, retailers, the media and bloggers since right before...

The Lights Flicker at Dell.
March 2, 2009... Dell's earnings were down 48% to $351 million, 18 cents a share, on revenues down 16% to $13.4 billion and units down 12% in the January quarter, three of the single worst months since PCs were invented. Dell's gross margin dropped from 18.7%...

Google's App Engine Goes Commercial.
March 2, 2009... Google is ready to start charging for its App Engine cloud platform. For the 10 months it's been in preview it's been free to use but limited to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU, bandwidth and whatnot to support about five...

HP To Resell Solaris on ProLiant.
March 2, 2009... Sun and HP were once great enemies. Sun is now so toothless it needs to sell its software on other people's hardware. And, given the recession, HP is not so foolish as to leave a penny on the table. Besides it owns EDS now, an experience that...

Cloud Start-up Fails, Widgetry Goes to SAP.
March 2, 2009... Coghead, an Amazon EC2-hosted platform-as-a-service start-up that reportedly couldn't repay a million-dollar loan it owed to Western Technology Investment, has sold its IP to SAP, which has no intention of keeping the company going. Terms...

Microsoft Feels the Economic Pain, Shows Wall Street Where It Hurts.
March 2, 2009... Microsoft doesn't expect the global economic contraction to loosen up this year or for a long time after that. It's studied the worst of the US meltdowns - 1820, 1873, 1929 - and recovery always took time. The company says its sales...

Google Wants To Bring the Horse to Microsoft Hanging.
March 2, 2009... Google wants in on the European Commission's latest push to dismember Windows. It's asked to intervene in the EC's Opera-inspired case charging Microsoft with illegally tying its IE browser to its operating system. Google, which now...

European Star Chamber Strikes Again.
March 2, 2009... The European Commission says it won't let Intel defend itself against antitrust charges that it has squeezed AMD out of the market at the oral hearing that Intel has requested and that usually caps such findings. It's being punished for...

Citrix Makes Bomb Run on VMware.
March 2, 2009... Citrix made an all-out strategic strike on VMware. It's going to stop selling XenServer 5 - the open source virtual infrastructure that it's added a bunch of proprietary features to since it acquired XenSource last year - and offer it to...

While Bullets Fly Around It, VMware Issues a Progress Report.
March 2, 2009... VMware has been peddling this vision of companies setting up internal clouds that bridge to external clouds using its promised Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), VDC-OS extensions and a management layer that lets service providers...

Red Hat Sketches Out Its KVM Virtualization Plans.
March 2, 2009... Red Hat, which is coming from behind and has to mange a change in strategic direction, moving its followers from Xen to KVM virtualization, is putting together a new portfolio of virtualization products that's supposed to break down the...

VMware Licenses Neverfail Technology.
March 2, 2009... VMware has licensed Neverfail's high availability/disaster recovery software to serve as its new vCenter Server Heartbeat solution - a shiny new VMware product that monitors and manages the automatic failover of its vCenter Server. A year...

Bull Launches myVMBox.(Brief article)
March 2, 2009... Bull has come up with what it calls myVMBox, a built-to-order combination of VMware Infrastructure on Bull NovaScale servers and StoreWay storage plus a systems administration platform supporting VMware's vCenter and Bull's System Manager. ...

VMware Adds vShield Security Appliance.
March 2, 2009... Among the flourishes it promised at VMworld Europe this week, VMware added vShield Zones, a new security virtual appliance for its upcoming Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) both due later this year. The appliance is supposed to...

New CEO Remaking Yahoo in Her Image.
March 2, 2009... Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo for all of six weeks, is reorganizing the place and getting some of the yahoos out of Yahoo. Where Microsoft winds up is unclear. She appears to be centralizing more of the management in her own hands and trying...

Canonical Aims Koala at Amazon's Cloud.
March 2, 2009... Last Friday Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth dubbed the next turn of Ubuntu "Karmic Koala," the future Ubuntu 9.10 due in October, and immediately pointed its server side to the cloud. "Ubuntu," he said on a blog, "aims to keep free...

Novell's Net Income Off 36%.
March 2, 2009... Novell's net income skidded 36% to $11 million, or three cents a share, in the January quarter, its first fiscal quarter, on revenues down $16 million, or 6.9%, to $215 million. On a non-GAAP basis the company beat the Street by a penny at...

Gmail Crash Idles Workers.(Brief article)
March 2, 2009... Gmail, which has something like 31 million users, went down again globally for two-and-half hours by Google's count on Tuesday, starting at around 9:30am GMT. This time it was it was due to routine maintenance in one of its European data...

AMD To Get Istanbul Out on Time.
March 2, 2009... AMD has been publicly demonstrating of its upcoming six-core 45nm Opteron processor, code named Istanbul, to prove that it's gonna get out in the second half. Istanbul is a rival of Intel's six-core 45nm Dunnington chip already in circulation....

Mips Joins Linux Foundation.
March 2, 2009... Mips Technologies, these days an embedded chip house, has joined the Linux Foundation.It says a large majority of Mips developers are using Linux for product development and imagines an evolution in consumer platform support on multi-core...

Novell Cuts Deal with VMware.
March 2, 2009... What with everybody's dancing a few steps with everybody else - virtually speaking - Novell struck a broad collaboration pact with VMware so ISVs can build fully supported SUSE-based virtual appliances on VMware ESX. It's trying to entice...

Amazon Fiddles with Utility Pricing.
March 16, 2009... Amazon Web Services (AWS), the subsidiary that runs the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), has tinkered with the cloud's established pay-as-you-go pricing structure and come up with what it calls reserved instances. Customers will be able...

On-Demand Instances.(Amazon.com Inc.)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... United States Europe Standard On-Demand Instances Linux/UNIX Usage Windows Usage Small (Default) $0.10 per hour $0.125 per hour Large $0.40 per hour $0.50 per hour Extra Large $0.80 per hour $1.00 per hour High CPU On-Demand Instances...

Google's Americas Sales Chief To Run AOL.
March 16, 2009... Time Warner dumped the misbegotten team of AOL CEO and chairman Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant late Thursday and wheeled in Tim Armstrong, until that minute Google's Americas sales chief, as CEO and chairman. Google, remember, owns 5% of...

Oracle Reported Interested in Buying Virtual Iron.
March 16, 2009... Last week's Wall Street scuttlebutt that Oracle might make a so-called "strategic" move and acquire Virtual Iron has now blossomed into a couple of unconfirmed press reports that the pair has progressed to a signed letter of intent. ...

Google's Cloud Springs a Scary Leak.
March 16, 2009... Some users of Google's vaunted Google Docs service discovered this weekend that behind their backs the widgetry has been sharing some of their documents with folks who were never authorized to see them. There are at least three things that...

Failures Darken Google Cloud.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... No sooner was Google over a reportedly limited Google Docs security breach this weekend when Gmail started acting up, giving the Google cloud, in particular, and all clouds, in general, another black eye. Some Gmail users were without...

Penguin Out with Linux-Based GPU Clusters.(graphics processing unit)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Penguin Computing has started peddling a couple of fully integrated Nvidia GPU-based clusters targeted at technical workgroup computing. Their CPUs are AMD Shanghais. The Linux-based Altus 1702 cluster has four twin 1U compute nodes, four...

Microsoft Piggybacks on Eclipse.
March 16, 2009... A release candidate of Eclipse4SL has arrived. That's the open source plug-in commissioned by Microsoft from Eclipse Foundation member Soyatec, a French-based "open solutions" company, so cross-platform Silverlight-based rich Internet...

Compiere Leverages EC2.
March 16, 2009... Compiere, the open source ERP house that sounds like it should be in Rome but is actually in Redwood Shores, California, has released its ERP solution on Amazon's EC2 cloud. It calls the stuff its Cloud Edition and says it's based on its...

RightScale Supports Ubuntu in the Clouds.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... RightScale, the cloud manager, says it can now fully support Ubuntu Server with its Cloud Management Platform on cloud infrastructures such as Amazon EC2. Since Ubuntu is such a fast-growing Linux distribution, RightScale anticipates that...

Microsoft Rubs Shoulders with Open Source.
March 16, 2009... Microsoft and the Creative Commons turned up at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and released an Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 so authors can add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies,...

Satyam Goes to the Auction Block.
March 16, 2009... A majority 51% of the big survival-threatened Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services Ltd, whose disgraced founder and former CEO confessed in January to loading its books with a billion dollars in "fictitious" assets and "non-existent"...

Atlassian Launches Elastic Bamboo.
March 16, 2009... Atlassian, the Australian ISV that makes the JIRA issue tracker and the Confluence enterprise wiki, has pushed out the 2.2 release of Bamboo, its continuous integration server. The widgetry's dubbed Elastic Bamboo because of a sexy new feature...

FBI Raids the Old Offices of Obama's CIO Appointee.
March 16, 2009... A week after resigning as CTO of the District of Columbia to become the first chief information officer of the United States of America under the Obama administration, the FBI raided the old D.C. offices of Delhi-born Vivek Kundra and arrested...

Microsoft Tries to Antitrust-Proof Windows 7.
March 16, 2009... It's official. Microsoft is going to let PC users turn its browser off in Windows 7 to keep the European Commission at bay. The EC's latest indictment of Microsoft accuses it of the antitrust sin of tying Internet Explorer to the Windows...

EC Extends Microsoft Deadline.
March 16, 2009... Microsoft was supposed to submit its rebuttal to the European Commission's January antitrust finding that bundling the Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system is anti-competitive the other day. Instead it asked for and...

Apple Netbook Rumors Back.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Rumors that Apple is working on a netbook are back. It all started Monday when DigiTimes read in the Chinese language Commercial Times that Quanta, which knocks off Apple's MacBooks and iMacs, will make the thing and that Wintek will supply...

HP Claims 'Industry Changing' Data Center Design.
March 16, 2009... HP has come up with a timely new device that promises to cut the capital cost of data centers by 15%-25%. And increase their efficiency while it's at it. It claims it's "industry changing." It's called multi-tiered hybrid design and HP...

Stratus Gives Away VMware Software.
March 16, 2009... Stratus Technologies is giving away VMware's Infrastructure Foundation software for free with its Intel-based ftServer fault-tolerant systems. It calls it its "We Feel Your Pain" campaign. According to SVP, product & solutions development...

SAP Standardizes on Citrix XenServer & XenApp.
March 16, 2009... Citrix has picked up a little showcase account. It says SAP will virtualize about 500 servers with XenServer by mid-year to reap the rewards of server consolidation. Of course Citrix and SAP have been tight for a long time and of...

ScaleMP Boosts the Software in its Virtual SMP Box.
March 16, 2009... ScaleMP, the folks whose Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple x86 systems into a single virtual x86 HPC system, has enhanced the performance of its flagship vSMP Foundation software with a 2.0 rev that supports the Intel...

Nvidia Trolls for Investments.
March 16, 2009... Nvidia, whose revenues ducked into the crapper last quarter and who's got myriad other problems too, has effectively put an ad in the paper looking for a handful of promising early-stage start-ups that will grow the GPS platform that it sees as...

Cisco Believed Ready To Out its Servers.
March 16, 2009... It appears that Cisco, the router king, is going to make its reported move into the already crowded server business on Monday March 16. Remember? It's supposedly been working with VMware, where it's invested, on a blade server code named...

SCO Gets Expedited Hearing.
March 16, 2009... After years of watching the paint peel while the Utah district court dragged its heels on one decision after another, SCO is suddenly being accorded first-class treatment by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. The company has been granted its...

SAP Drinks at the Star Trek Bar.
March 16, 2009... SAP's complex Business Suite software is on its way to the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile-based smartphones integrated with Sybase's mobile enterprise application platform. SAP and Sybase are working together on the project; Sybase is...

VMware's a Keeper: EMC CEO.
March 16, 2009... CEO Joe Tucci said for what must be the umpteenth time Tuesday that EMC has no intention of parting with its ~84% majority stake in virtualization leader VMware. The occasion was EMC's first analyst day in a dog's age. EMC has been under pretty...

Techs Considered Dow Material.
March 16, 2009... Google, Cisco, Amazon and Apple are being bruited as possible replacements for Citigroup and General Motors on the vaunted Dow Jones industrial average. The gilt edge on both Citi and GM has tarnished and their stock, despite the bailout, is in...

Hitachi Fined for LCD Price Fixing.
March 16, 2009... Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Displays pleaded guilty and will fork over $31 million in fines for conspiring to fix the prices of TFT-LCDs sold to Dell for its PCs in 2001-2004 according to the Justice Department. Hitachi Displays will also be...

GlobalFoundaries Trawls for Business.
March 16, 2009... DigiTimes says GlobalFoundaries CEO Doug Grose, the head of the newfangled AMD-Abu Dhabi joint venture, the one-time AMD plants, is on his way to Taiwan to look for GPU and chipset business and bearing discounts. The paper says it's "looking to...

VIA Plans Netbook Summit.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... VIA has invited its 200 nearest and dearest PC makers and infrastructure folk as well as curiosity seekers to a meeting March 17 in China to "define the future of the mini-notebook," a k a the netbook. VIA currently claims 50 designs, with...

SGI Threatened with Delisting.
March 16, 2009... The once great Silicon Graphics has gotten a delisting notice asking it to decamp from the Nasdaq because its stock can't break the dollar barrier. The company's asked for the usual hearing, a move that stayed the threatened March 12 suspension...

Cisco Takes its Long Shot at Morphing into IT's El Supremo.
March 23, 2009... Cisco CEO John Chambers Monday became the latest in a long line of visionaries to come down from the mountain top with an architectural roadmap to the Promised Land at an exploitable industry inflection point. If the purportedly...

IBM Supposedly Interested in Buying Sun.
March 23, 2009... Back about 15 years ago after Lou Gerstner saved IBM from falling off a cliff and Sun was still a comer Gerstner and Sun CEO Scott McNealy used to have breakfast, lunch or dinner more than ever so often and Scooter invariably pitched Lou on...

Hadoop Start-up Attracts Glitterati Investors.
March 23, 2009... Cloudera, the start-up that going to commercialize Hadoop, the Google-inspired, Apache-fostered open source software that powers the data processing engines behind some of the biggest and most popular web sites - sites like Yahoo, Facebook,...

Greenplum Claims Breakthrough in Data Loading.
March 23, 2009... Greenplum, the high-end open source database house and friend of Sun - so it's gotta be nibbling on its nails wondering whether it's lost a channel - has some sexy new technology to accelerate data loading for companies stressing under...

TomTom Countersues Microsoft: Report.
March 23, 2009... At press time, CNet was reporting that TomTom, the Dutch GPS company that Microsoft sued last month for patent infringement, three of its so-called Linux patents, has returned the favor and has charged Microsoft's Street and Trips widgetry with...

Chrome Back in Beta.
March 23, 2009... Google's Chrome browser has been through 29 updates since it launched six months ago. It's also one of the only Google products to escape beta. Now Google has "forked" Chrome into a stable release and a flakier developer-oriented...

What Cisco Says about its Unified Computing System.(Cisco Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
March 23, 2009... * Every second, every day, six people sign on to the Internet for the first time in their lives joining the connected global population. Every second, this global community views 1,200 videos on YouTube, shares 11,000 songs and sends two...

Oracle To Pay its First Dividend.
March 23, 2009... In a completely uncharacteristic and counter-culture move - the recession has slashed a lot of dividends - Oracle is going to pay out its very first dividend. It's going to pay five cents a share starting in May at the cost of about a billion a...

Sun Reaches for the Cloud.
March 23, 2009... Sun has taken some of that hardware it can't sell and turned it into a public cloud infrastructure that it's going to try to rent just like Amazon. Sun rolled out its latest cloud gambit Wednesday. It's done Solaris-based clouds before and...

3Tera To Offer Five9s Cloud SLA.(service level agreement )
March 23, 2009... 3Tera, the cloud maker, has come up with the first Five9s cloud computing service level agreement (SLA) and plans to use it to warrant the availability of its AppLogic Virtual Private Datacenter (VPDC) widgetry. SLAs are rare in the cloud....

Friday the 13th Unlucky for Windows Azure.
March 23, 2009... Windows Azure, Microsoft's contribution to cloud race and not yet released, went down over the weekend for a long 22 hours, which should do nothing to instill confidence in anyone about the whole cloud concept, beta or not. Microsoft says...

Privacy Police Want FTC To Investigate Google Cloud Services.
March 23, 2009... The Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation of Google's cloud computing services including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Desktop, Google Calendar and Picasa to...

IE8 Out.(Internet Explorer 8)(Brief article)
March 23, 2009... Microsoft has pushed out Internet Explorer 8. PC arbiter Walt Mossberg, who calls the browser arguably the most important piece of software on a computer, says it's a big improvement over IE7 and a "much closer competitor to its main...

HP Launches New Low-End NonStops.
March 23, 2009... HP's got a new entry-level family of NonStop Integrity servers to target at smaller emerging markets and the NonStop installed base still using Mips-based products whose monthly maintenance and support costs, it says, will take a dive if they...

Cisco Fallout.
March 23, 2009... Goldman Sachs expects Cisco's advance into servers to have no impact on HP or IBM in the intermediate term. The broker reckons Cisco's ramp will be slow and user trials of its high-end systems long. It also figures that the fact that its server...

Google Replaces Exec Lost to AOL.(Dennis Woodside succeeds Tim Armstrong)(Brief article)
March 23, 2009... The end of last week Google lost Tim Armstrong, the guy running its US and South American sales, the source of most of its revenue, to AOL, where he's going to be CEO and chairman. So on Tuesday it moved quickly to fill the key spot and named...

Telstra Bails on Satyam.
March 23, 2009... Telstra, the big Australian telecoms house, has pulled out of fraud-beset Indian outsourcer Satyam according to the Australian, which puts the value of the applications support contract at $21 million a year. It's reportedly moving the account,...

VMware Poaches CA Exec To Run Asia Pacific.
March 23, 2009... VMware has tapped Andrew Dutton to run its Asia Pacific and Japan business. It pulled the Australian out of CA where he was undoubtedly leading a more pedestrian if busy life as senior vice-president and general manager of international...

Dell Continues Layoffs.
March 23, 2009... Late last month Dell upped its cost-shaving target from $3 billion to $4 billion by February 2011 and last Wednesday it started laying off hundreds of its people globally. It won't say how many or where. Its factories in North Carolina and...

Google To Start Running Behavior Ads.(Brief article)
March 23, 2009... Google is going to start turning all that information that it's gotten from people's search preferences into behavior-based ads under a program announced last week that's based on widgetry Google acquired when it bought DoubleClick last year...

US CIO Reinstated after FBI Raid.
March 23, 2009... America's first federal CIO, Obama appointee Vivek Kundra, was briefly put on leave right after the FBI raided his old offices and arrested two ex-Kundra staffers, charging one of them, Washington. DC's information system security officer no...

VMware CEO Angel Backer of Apture.
March 23, 2009... VMware CEO Paul Maritz and former SGI senior VP and erstwhile Warburg Pincus managing director Beau Vrolyk are angel investors in the San Mateo, California start-up Apture, where Vrolyk is executive chairman. They were part of Apture's...

Microsoft Rips Secret 'Cloudnapping' Manifesto.
March 30, 2009... Microsoft has emitted a squeal of protest much like a stuck pig over a secret "Open Cloud Manifesto" that it says is quietly being handed around the industry seeking signoffs. It doesn't identify the author or authors of this manifesto -...

Cloud Manifesto Reportedly Imminent.
March 30, 2009... Unless there's another one floating around out there in the ether, the secret Open Cloud Manifesto that has Microsoft's knickers in a twist is supposed to be unveiled on Monday March 30 according Reuven Cohen, the CEO of Toronto-based cloud...

Microsoft Nixes Private Use of Azure.
March 30, 2009... Microsoft's unreleased Azure cloud is not meant for private on-premises hosting, the company said. It's strictly a Microsoft data centers-only thing supposedly because some of the new Azure widgetry Microsoft invents is bound to turn up in...

TomTom Lines Up Big Guns for Microsoft Fight.
March 30, 2009... TomTom, the Dutch GPS player that Microsoft sued a couple of weeks ago for patent infringement specifically charging its Linux kernel with offending, has not only countersued it's lining up allies in a move that practically guarantees a bloody...

Dell Claims To Make Hay with Sun's Fate Unclear.
March 30, 2009... Michael Dell claimed Tuesday that the mere talk of a Sun-IBM tie-up is an "enormous opportunity" for Dell servers since it creates an air of uncertainty around the future of Sun's Solaris-based boxes and accelerates the move to x86 Linux...

Suit Accuses Windows Update of Infringing.
March 30, 2009... BackWeb Technologies Ltd has sued Microsoft for patent infringement, alleging that its Background Intelligent Transfer Service, otherwise known as BITS, introduced in 2001 in Windows XP and now in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server...

IBM To Move 5,000 US Jobs to India.
March 30, 2009... IBM is reportedly transferring US jobs in its Global Services unit to India. The Wall Street Journal said Wednesday morning that the company was expected to tell "a large number" of American workers that their jobs were either being...

Cassatt-Made Internal Clouds Get Bigger.
March 30, 2009... Cassatt, which plays to corporate fear of entrusting enterprise applications to external service providers, has updated its Active Response software. The stuff helps companies automate and transform existing data center resources into...

Carbonite Lost Data, Sues Storage Vendor.
March 30, 2009... Carbonite, the online backup vendor, says it lost data belonging to over 7,500 customers in a number of separate incidents mostly in 2007 in a suit filed in Massachusetts charging Promise Technology Inc with supplying it with $3 million worth...